The Rockwell Heist: The extraordinary theft of seven Norman Rockwell paintings and a phony Renoir—and the 20-year chase for their recovery from the Midwest through Europe and South America
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About this ebook
The FBI suspected an inside job. Was it the scrappy working mother who owned the gallery? The owner of one of the paintings, who had a checkered past? Was a band of well-known and very talented Minneapolis burglars involved? And what about organized crime, which had the channels and expertise to fence the works or to hold them hostage? Tantalizing threads tied the case to the theft of another stolen forgery in New York City. But a sting operation fell short, and the trail for recovering the works ran cold. The bureau's search for the paintings stopped, and it closed the case in 1987.
Gallery owner Elayne Lindberg and her daughter Bonnie, motivated in part by their desire to clear Elayne's name, continued the hunt. Their story moves to shady connections and the international trade in stolen art, through Portugal, Argentina, Las Vegas, and Brazil, before its final dramatic resolution.
Bruce Rubenstein
Bruce Rubenstein, a Twin Cities writer and editor who has covered crime and politics since the 1980s, is the author of Greed, Rage, and Love Gone Wrong. He has received numerous awards for investigative journalism.
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The Rockwell Heist - Bruce Rubenstein
1
On the evening of February 16, 1978, more than five hundred people gathered at Elayne Galleries in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, to drink champagne, celebrate Norman Rockwell’s eighty-fourth birthday, and maybe purchase some art.
It was the largest show of Rockwell’s paintings ever held in a private gallery. The plans originally included an appearance by Rockwell, but the artist couldn’t attend. He was bedridden, and would die nine months later. Nevertheless, he was a major presence at the show. Eight of his original paintings were on display, as were many of his signed, limited-edition lithographs.
A dock scene attributed to the French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir was the co-feature. It had a crack extending from the edge into the artist’s signature that diminished its value somewhat, but it was still worth plenty. Altogether the exhibition was an impressive array of valuable art, well publicized and well attended.
Unlike many gallery owners, Elayne and Russ Lindberg had taken steps to prevent a robbery. They had hired a contractor to make the premises secure. He installed an audio-sonic alarm and a theft proof
lock. They hired the Pinkerton Agency to guard the premises for the duration of the show.
The Lindbergs had gained a nationwide reputation for handling Rockwell’s work. Six of his paintings were on loan for the show, but two others belonged to the gallery, and the opening attracted the kind of collectors who might be interested in buying them.
The invitation to the show at Elayne Galleries at which the paintings were stolen. This special invitation went out to a list of more than five hundred gallery clients.
It was a good time to be in the business. Art as an investment was becoming very popular in the 1970s,
says the gallery owners’ daughter, Bonnie Lindberg, now an estate appraiser in St. Louis Park.
Bonnie was twenty-two when the Rockwell party took place, blond and pretty, with a dazzling smile. Her mother, a publicity hound who knew how to stage an event, made sure her daughter was around at openings. Her presence was one small detail of a marketing plan that was part buzz and part blitzkrieg. Mailings had gone to clients and potential clients, and circulars had been handed to people on the street and tucked under the windshields of parked cars. There were blurbs in newspapers, and word of mouth had spread via a network that reached art collectors and artists, of course, but also Elayne Lindberg’s former colleagues from law enforcement and probably a few shoplifters she had collared during her days as a store detective. Elayne’s knack for turning an opening into a well-orchestrated extravaganza had boosted her gallery into the top echelon of the local art scene by 1978. Later that year, a show at Elayne Galleries would be billed as the largest one-time exhibit ever
of the Minnesota-born artist LeRoy Neiman’s work. It featured more than seventy original paintings, prints and posters, plus the artist himself, sporting his trademark moustache. A delegation of boosters from the town of Leroy, Minnesota, arrived about the time the crowd peaked and presented Neiman with the keys to their city.
Elayne Lindberg, her daughter Bonnie, and the sheet cake baked for the opening of the Rockwell show
The Rockwell bash was a gala evening by all accounts, despite an unnerving incident the day before. Three men who didn’t look like art lovers had strolled into the gallery. Extra help had been hired for the show, and the place was bustling with preparations, but the general demeanor of the three, and the fact that one of them didn’t bother taking off his sunglasses as he viewed paintings, got everybody’s attention.
Things more or less came to a halt,
Elayne Lindberg later told investigators.
The men had some pointed questions to ask about the value of various works of art. Russ Lindberg, normally affable and outgoing, was short with them. He took note of their bold
attitude and their physical appearance.
After splitting up and browsing awhile, the men gathered near the Renoir, where they were overheard discussing what measures might be in place to protect it. Russ thought they were paying particular attention to the windows and doors. They stayed about twenty-five minutes. When they left, Russ followed them outside and wrote down the license number of their car, a white 1976 Chevy Impala.
I think he wanted them to know he’d spotted them,
says his son, Gary, thirty-five at the time, now an author living in Chanhassen, Minnesota.
The impression the incident left was of three workmanlike robbers who knew exactly what they wanted and were casing the gallery for entrance and exit routes. Elayne Lindberg called them cocky.
After the party ended and the gallery closed for the night, seven of the Rockwell paintings and the Renoir were stolen. The thieves punched the theft proof
lock and cut the electrical cord that powered the alarm. The ease with which they foiled the security system indicated that they were either very skilled or had some familiarity with its components. The art was estimated to be worth $500,000 when it was stolen, and even though one of the paintings has since proven to be a fake, their net value has mushroomed to more than $1 million now, making it the biggest robbery in the state’s history. The crime was never solved, but the Rockwell paintings were recovered twenty-two years later, after they had been bought and sold on three continents.
The FBI files and interviews with attorneys and others indicate that the theft was planned at the last moment. The perpetrators evidently either checked out an opportunity spotted by someone they were inclined to blow off and discovered it was real or they got a contract for a rush job from organized crime figures on the East Coast.
A last-minute hitch prevented them from taking one of the paintings they had targeted, but they got away cleanly with the others. It looked like they had hit the jackpot. The problem was monetization, but there is a lively market for stolen art and in 1978 it was evolving fast.
Today, according to Interpol, the global traffic in stolen art is an illicit commerce exceeded only by drugs and black market arms sales.
2
In fiction and film, art theft is depicted as a trade plied by master criminals who plan their robberies meticulously in order to foil elaborate security measures. In reality, most art is pilfered opportunistically by thieves who know an easy score when they spot one. Works that are marketable but not well known make up the bulk of stolen art, but more than $5 billion changes hands annually in the trade, an average fattened periodically by the theft of a masterpiece or, more often, several masterpieces. The lack of security at places where great art is displayed—museums, public buildings, galleries, and collectors’ homes—continually amazes investigators who specialize in such cases, all the more so because the cost of insuring masterpieces is astronomical and most owners pass entirely or insure for a fraction of value.
The twelve paintings by Rembrandt, Degas, Manet, and Vermeer, plus a Shang Dynasty vase, that were stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston—worth an estimated $200 million—were not insured against theft at all. It couldn’t have been because the curators never considered the possibility. Art journals and museum newsletters routinely take note of art thefts, and they’ve always had plenty to discuss.
The Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911. Like many art thefts, it was an inside job, and the painting was recovered from a museum guard’s home in 1913. In 1961, Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington
was stolen from England’s National Gallery. Two paintings by Piero della Francesca and a Raphael were stolen from the Ducal Palace in Urbino, Italy, in 1975. In 2002, two Van Goghs were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 2006, paintings by Dali, Picasso, Matisse, and Monet were taken from the Chácara do Céu Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
A 1988 theft in New York netted eighteen paintings, including two by the early Renaissance Florentine, Fra Angelico. It took place at the Manhattan branch of the London dealer Colnaghi’s and illustrated something art thieves had figured out a decade or so earlier: the value of works on display in private homes and galleries often rivals those at museums, and the security is even worse.
In 2012, works by Vermeer, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Van Gogh were all listed on the Art Loss Register (an authoritative database of missing art used by museums, art dealers, and law enforcement), among them the loot from a theft at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in which five paintings worth $123 million were stolen. At the time of the theft at the Musée, an alarm system had been broken for three months. External cameras meant to catch would-be robbers in the act were focused on the roof, but the thief or thieves broke a window and entered unnoticed. Guards were said to be napping. Musée officials refused to discuss how much insurance they had on the paintings, leading most observers to conclude they had none.
3
The building at 6111 Excelsior Boulevard was Elayne Galleries’ second location. Six years before the robbery, it had opened in a St. Louis Park storefront, with an inventory of European oil paintings that Russ Lindberg had acquired in connection with his interior decorating business. Sales were brisk, and the Lindbergs soon decided they needed more space. The mall where they moved wasn’t exactly where one would expect to find an art gallery, but it fit Elayne Lindberg’s unconventional approach to the business.
Mom was all about sales,
says Bonnie Lindberg, and she wasn’t shy when it came to publicity. She’d mail out circulars to everyone she could think of. She even put them under the windshield wipers of cars when we were having a show.
The robbery was carefully planned and methodically executed. Only the most valuable pieces were taken. Investigators assumed that the three men who came to the gallery the day before were